“How Reese Witherspoon and Megan Ellison are changing the movies”
A Washington Post feature by Alyssa Rosenberg:
Last week, I wrote about how hard it was going to be to fill the slate of Best Actress nominees at the Academy Awards, given how few movies this year gave women significant screen time and rich, complex parts. But two of the movies that have produced genuine contenders–David Fincher’s “Gone Girl” and Jean-Marc Vallée’s “Wild”–have one thing in common: Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Pacific Standard.
Witherspoon, who was part of the Hollywood Reporter’s annual actress roundtable, told the magazine that her success as both a producer and a potential Best Actress contender (she stars as memoirist Cheryl Strayed in “Wild”) were the result of a recent decision: to stop waiting for other people to start making movies about interesting female characters.
“I can’t speak for other people. I just recognize that about three years ago, I started seeing this complete lack of interesting female leads in film. First I got mad, really mad. And then I was like, “It’s nobody’s fault; if you’re not proactive about things …” I’d had a company before, but it was basically about trying to develop things that I would eventually be in,” Witherspoon explained. “So I just switched the idea: If I can develop anything for any other women, I don’t care who it is; I just want my daughter to grow up seeing complex, interesting, nuanced women in film. So I started it with my own money — you know, the first thing people tell you is, “Don’t put your own money into anything” — so I was like, is this really dumb? But I got a great partner [Bruna Papandrea] and the first two things I sent her were ‘Gone Girl’ and ‘Wild.’ And those were the first books that we optioned.”
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Witherspoon is hardly the first woman to make this hike, of course. Her potential awards-season dominance recalls that of Megan Ellison (daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison), whose Annapurna Pictures production company has also turned out a reliable series of contenders and intelligent provocations. Annapurna Pictures movies tend to be less intrigued by the inner lives of women, and they are more likely than Pacific Standard films to have male main characters. But the women in movies Ellison makes never seem less than formidable and fascinating, even when they have to swipe the movie from a male co-star or lead.
As Darnell Hunt in my recent interview suggested, the issue of gender and racial inequality on all fronts of the Hollywood movie and TV business is systemic. One thing that is needed is for creatives to take the lead in creating and championing stories that embrace diversity as well as compelling, interesting characters.
What Witherspoon is doing is admirable, but we don’t have to be a movie star to take up the call. As writers, we have a choice as to the type of material we write. If we’ve got a great story idea that features a female and/or ethnic lead, don’t let conventional wisdom stop you. Write that script. The more and better material out there, the more likely we’ll scripts that embrace diversity get produced.
For the rest of the WAPO article, go here.